from:
Working Mother - September 1987
The
Case Against Competition
When
it comes to competition, we Americans typically recognize only two
legitimate positions: enthusiastic support and qualified
support.
The first view holds that the more we immerse
our children (and ourselves) in rivalry, the better. Competition
builds character and produces excellence. The second stance admits
that our society has gotten carried away with the need to be Number
One, that we push our kids too hard and too fast to become winners --
but insists that competition can be healthy and fun if we keep it in
perspective.
I used to be in the second camp. But after
five years of investigating the topic, looking at research from
psychology, sociology, education and other fields. I'm now convinced
that neither position is correct. Competition is bad news all right,
but it's not just that we overdo it or misapply it. The trouble lies
with competition itself. The best amount of competition for our
children is none at all, and the very phrase "healthy
competition" is actually a contradiction in terms.
That
may sound extreme if not downright un-American. But some things
aren't just bad because they're done to excess; some things are
inherently destructive. Competition, which simply means that one
person can succeed only if others fail, is one of those things. It's
always unnecessary and inappropriate at school, at play and at
home.
Think for a moment about the goals you have for
your children. Chances are you want them to develop healthy
self-esteem, to accept themselves as basically good people. You want
them to become successful, to achieve the excellence of which they're
capable. You want them to have loving and supportive relationships.
And you want them to enjoy themselves.
These are fine
goals. But competition not only isn't necessary for reaching them --
it actually undermines them.
Competition is to self-esteem
as sugar is to teeth. Most people lose in most competitive
encounters, and it's obvious why that causes self-doubt. But even
winning doesn't build character; it just lets a child gloat
temporarily. Studies have shown that feelings of self-worth become
dependent on external sources of evaluation as a result of
competition: Your value is defined by what you've done. Worse --
you're a good person in proportion to the number of people you've
beaten.
In a competitive culture, a child is told
that it isn't enough to be good -- he must triumph over others.
Success comes to be defined as victory, even though these are really
two very different things. Even when the child manages to win, the
whole affair, psychologically speaking, becomes a vicious circle: The
more he competes, the more he needs to compete to feel good about
himself.
When I made this point on The Phil
Donahue Show last year, my objections were waved aside by the parents
of a seven-year-old tennis champion named Kyle, who appeared on the
program with me. Kyle had been used to winning ever since a tennis
racket was put in his hands at the age of two. But at the very end of
the show, someone in the audience asked him how he felt when he lost.
Kyle lowered his head and in a small voice replied, "Ashamed."
This
is not to say that children shouldn't learn discipline and tenacity,
that they shouldn't be encouraged to succeed or even have a nodding
acquaintance with failure. But none of these requires winning and
losing -- that is, having to beat other children and worry about
being beaten. When classrooms and playing fields are based on
cooperation rather than competition, children feel better about
themselves. They work with others instead of against them, and their
self-esteem doesn't depend on winning a spelling bee or a Little
League game.
Children succeed in spite of competition, not
because of it. Most of us were raised to believe that we do our best
work when we're in a race -- that without competition we would all
become fat, lazy and mediocre. It's a belief that our society takes
on faith. It's also false.
There is good evidence
that productivity in the workplace suffers as a result of
competition. The research is even more compelling in classroom
settings. David Johnson, a professor of social psychology at the
University of Minnesota, and his colleagues reviewed all the studies
they could find on the subject from 1924 to 1980. Sixty-five of the
studies found that children learn better when they work cooperatively
as opposed to competitively, eight found the reverse, and 36 found no
significant difference. The more complex the learning task, the worse
children in a competitive environment fared.
Brandeis
University psychologist Teresa Amabile was more interested in
creativity. She asked 22 girls, ages seven to 11, to make "silly
collages." Some competed for prizes and some didn't. Seven
artists then independently rated the girls' work. It turned out that
the children who were trying to win produced collages that were much
less creative -- less spontaneous, complex and varied -- than the
others.
One after another, researchers across the
country have concluded that children do not learn better when
education is transformed into a competitive struggle. Why? First,
competition often makes kids anxious and that interferes with
concentration. Second, competition doesn't permit them to share their
talents and resources as cooperation does, so they can't learn from
one another. Finally, trying to be Number One distracts them from
what they're supposed to be learning. It may seem paradoxical, but
when a student concentrates on the reward (an A or a gold star or a
trophy), she becomes less interested in what she's doing. The result:
Performance declines.
Just because forcing children to
try to outdo one another is counterproductive doesn't mean they can't
keep track of how they're doing. There's no problem with comparing
their achievements to an objective standard (how fast they ran, how
many questions they got right) or to how they did yesterday or last
year. But any mother who values intellectual development for her
child should realize that turning learning into a race simply doesn't
work.
Competition is a recipe for hostility. By definition,
not everyone can win a contest. If one child wins, another cannot.
This means that each child inevitably comes to regard others as
obstacles to his or her own success. Forget fractions or home runs;
this is the real lesson our children learn in a competitive
environment.
Competition leads children to envy
winners, to dismiss losers (there's no nastier epithet in our
language than "Loser! ) and to be suspicious of just about
everyone. Competition makes it difficult to regard others as
potential friends or collaborators; even if you're not my rival
today, you could be tomorrow.
This is not to say that
competitors will always detest each other. But trying to outdo
someone is not conducive to trust -- indeed, it would be irrational
to trust someone who gains from your failure. At best, competition
leads one to look at others through narrowed eyes; at worst, it
invites outright aggression. Existing relationships are strained to
the breaking point, while new friendships are often nipped in the
bud.
Again, the research helps to explain the
destructive effect of win/lose arrangements. When children compete,
they are less able to take the perspective of others -- that is, to
see the world from someone else's point of view. One study
demonstrated conclusively that competitive children were less
empathetic than others; another study showed that competitive
children were less generous.
Cooperation, on the other
hand, is marvellously successful at helping children to communicate
effectively, to trust in others and to accept those who are different
from themselves. Competition interferes with these goals and often
results in outright antisocial behaviour. The choice is ours: We can
blame the individual children who cheat, turn violent or withdraw, or
we can face the fact that competition itself is responsible for such
ugliness.
Studies also show, incidentally, that
competition among groups isn't any better than competition among
individuals. Kids don't have to work against a common enemy in order
to know the joys of camaraderie or to experience success. Real
cooperation doesn't require triumphing over another group.
Having
fun doesn't mean turning playing fields into battlefields. It's
remarkable, when you top to think about it, that the way we teach our
kids to have a good time is to play highly structured games in which
one individual or team must defeat another.
Consider
one of the first games our children learn to play: musical chairs.
Take away one chair and one child in each round until one smug winner
is seated and everyone else has been excluded from play. You know
that sour birthday party scene; the needle is lifted from the record
and someone else is transformed into a loser, forced to sit out the
rest of the game with the other unhappy kids on the side. That's how
children learn to have fun in America.
Terry Orlick, a
Canadian expert on games, suggests changing the goal of musical
chairs so children are asked to fit on a diminishing number of seats.
At the end, seven or eight giggling, happy kids are trying to squish
on a single chair. Everyone has fun and there are no winners or
losers.
What's true of musical chairs is true of all
recreation; with a little ingenuity, we can devise games in which the
obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than
another person or team.
In fact, not one of the benefits
attributed to sports or other competitive games actually requires
competition. Children can get plenty of exercise without struggling
against each other. Teamwork? Cooperative games allow everyone to
work together, without creating enemies. Improving skills and setting
challenges? Again, an objective standard or one's own earlier
performance will do.
When Orlick taught a group of
children non-competitive games, two thirds of the boys and all of the
girls preferred them to games that require opponents. If our
culture's idea of a good time is competition, it may just be because
we haven't tried the alternative.
How can parents raise a
non-competitive child in a competitive world? Competition is actually
destructive to children's self-esteem. It interferes with learning,
sabotages relationships and isn't necessary for a good time. But how
do you raise a child in a culture that hasn't yet caught on to
this?
There are no easy answers here. But there is
one clearly unsatisfactory answer: Make your son or daughter
competitive in order to fit into the "real world." That
isn't desirable for the child -- for all the reasons given here --
and it perpetuates the poison of competition in another
generation.
Children can be taught about competition,
prepared for the destructive forces they'll encounter, without being
groomed to take part in it uncritically. They can be exposed to the
case against competition just as they are taught the harms of drug
abuse or reckless driving.
You will have to decide how
much compromise is appropriate so your child isn't left out or
ridiculed in a competitive society. But at least you can make your
decision based on knowledge about competition's destructiveness. You
can work with other parents and with your child's teachers and
coaches to help change the structures that set children against one
another. Of you may want to look into cooperative schools and summer
camps, which are beginning to catch on around the country.
As
for reducing rivalry and competitive attitudes in the home:
Avoid
comparing a child's performance to that of a sibling, a classmate, or
yourself as a child.
Don't use contests ("Who can dry
the dishes fastest?") around the house. Watch your use of
language ("Who's the best little girl in the whole wide world?")
that reinforces competitive attitudes.
Never make your love
or acceptance conditional on a child's performance. Some parents give
subtle messages; they may say to their child, "As long as you
did your best..." but Bobby knows that Mommy really likes him
better when he wins. Nothing is more psychologically destructive than
making approval dependent on victory.
Be aware of your power
as a model. If you need to beat others, your child will learn that
from you regardless of what you say. The lesson will be even stronger
if you use your child to provide you with vicarious
victories.
Raising healthy, happy, productive children
goes hand in hand with creating a better society. The first step to
achieving both is recognizing that our belief in the value of
competition is built on myths. There are better ways for our children
-- and for us -- to work and play and
live.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COOPERATIVE
GAMES
There are plenty of ways to create excitement and
challenge without competition. By emphasizing sportsmanship or
encouraging children not to keep score, you can try to reduce the
harm of competitive games. But why not solve the whole problem by
abandoning win/lose activities and switching to cooperative
recreation?
In cooperative volleyball, a player who
hits the ball over the net moves immediately to the other side. The
point is to switch teams completely without dropping the ball. Who
wins? The question is meaningless because the teams are fluid: there
are no "us" and "them" anymore. Maybe that's why
everyone has such a good time!
Or in many games you can
have both players try to reach an exact draw, which often takes
considerable skill. (In cooperative Chinese checkers, for instance,
players must coordinate their marbles' movement so they reach their
destinations simultaneously.) Require each player to reach a certain
score exactly. Have each player make a specified contribution to the
goal. Or have everyone work together to get something done before the
clock runs out.
Use your imagination to invent new
non-competitive games or adapt existing games (as Orlick did with
musical chairs) so everyone is rooting for everyone else. The result
will be children who grow up realizing you don't have to try to beat
other people to have a good time.
-
A.K.
_________________________________________________
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© 1987 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced,
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